


and then there were two.

by grassyhyuuga



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Angst, Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-13
Updated: 2014-09-13
Packaged: 2018-02-17 07:19:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2301209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grassyhyuuga/pseuds/grassyhyuuga
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is the sum of two negative numbers?</p>
            </blockquote>





	and then there were two.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yusagi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yusagi/gifts).



 

 

Have you ever watched a man grieve?   
  
It’s ugly, not like in the movies, where rain and piano music somehow make the process seem artistic. In real life, there is no soulful staring out windows, no medium-speed train rides through the countryside, just oily hair and dead eyes.  
  
It’s pathetic, because grief is such a selfish thing.   
  
Kakashi does not cry.   
  
He walks back to Konoha with dry eyes and squared shoulders as if he’s carrying both of their corpses (but of course he isn’t, because their final fight had left no corpses to bury). His hitai-ate has long been abandoned, and without it, he appears wilder than the most dangerous missing-nin.  
  
They won, but the world has never looked so dark.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Have you ever seen someone watch their world fall apart?

  
The rubble of the devastation surrounds them, but their eyes are cruelly fixed inwards at the darkness, like headlights at midnight, and they are paralysed by their own gaze. _What am I_ , they panic, _now that my world is shattered_. Often, they decide they ought to be  _everything_ , and they work at building a new world, all of their own, one orbiting their fears and desires and untouchable by others. Just as often, they salvage fragments of themselves from the wreckage and decide to become something better, stronger, different. Sometimes, though, they decide they are nothing.  
  
Sakura has long suspected that she is nothing. She’s spent the majority of her life trying to prove to herself otherwise.   
  
Her efforts are the ashes at her feet and the comrades whose hearts she failed to restart.  
  
Born to mediocrity, grown into mediocrity, and now, proven as mediocrity. On the way back to what used to be home, she cries, but she doesn’t do it for herself. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Change comes for Konoha, for the shinobi world, slowly yet surely, but never for them. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

He keeps no pictures in his flat.  
  
He doesn’t need pictures to remember their faces, _all_  of their faces. (He doesn’t have a mirror, either, so he probably recalls his father’s face better than his own.)   
  
Kakashi of the Sharingan has become Kakashi Who Couldn’t Save Any Of Them Despite His Thousand Jutsu.   
  
It’s a mouthful, but every day he reads the accuracy of it on their tombstones.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She doesn’t leave flowers at their graves.   
  
She doesn’t even ever visit their graves, though she makes sure they are well-tended. As if she needs a reminder that the sun is missing, or that the moon has disappeared, or that it hasn't rained for three years. It was never supposed to be this way, her, just her, in this office, alone, empty, her face on that wretched mountain of dead people, but it was never about her in the first place.   
  
Every time she signs a shinobi to their possible death, she feels it is tribute enough.  
  
(Flowers rot, and she can’t, not even if she wants to. Konoha flourishes under her rule. Whenever she smiles, it’s cloyingly sweet, like too much perfume.)

 

 

* * *

 

 

He still kills with the same impersonal efficiency, and sometimes he’s still late, but his heart’s not in it, like his tardiness is a damaged effort.   
  
That might be because, as always, he tries harder to please the dead than the living.   
  
Sakura presents the only exception. She is as much a part of his duty as his devotion to the village. For the most part, though, he deals with her in the only way he knows how — from a safe distance, for both him and her.  
  
(She reminds him of a dead girl.) 

 

 

* * *

 

 

She wants him, in the way that prisoners kept in darkness want the light (it would certainly blind them, but they don’t care), and he is too tired to deny her. He does not tell her “no”, does not tell her that she is heading down a one-way road toward destruction, because if not him, she would only crash full-speed into someone else. 

In some sick, perverse way, he feels responsible for her brokenness. 

She thinks he needs her, when, in truth, she needs to think that he needs her. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

She tastes like guilt and he tastes like failure, so when they kiss they screw their eyes shut and pretend to be alive. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

He says “I love you” back to her because it’s expected of him, just like the ring on her finger and the set of nice china that they hardly use since they never have guests.  
  
He fucks her hard when the dull spark in her eyes is going out, and he touches her like she’s a porcelain doll when they lose too many men whose names she had insisted on memorising.   
  
They’re never happy, but, sometimes, when Kakashi keeps his mask down for her sake and the sky is blue, Sakura fancies this is what happiness is, and that the euphoric contentment she’d imagined as a girl doesn’t exist. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

Even if he gives her everything she will not have enough, so he gives her very little of himself, scraps of humour, bits of affection, pieces of his thoughts — the ones that aren’t jagged and bloody at the edges. None of the history, though, and none of the pain.   
  
(He doesn’t have to. The guilt and the regrets seep through his walls, uncontrollable as osmosis, oozing thick and putrid. Her teeth are stained black by his insecurities as well as her own, and he wonders who will be the first to choke on the tangled mass that is their codependency. He tells himself it will be her, because she needs him to need her more than he actually needs her, but really he wants more than anything to die with her hands around his throat, her brown-green-brown eyes soft with hatred.   
  
Maybe, maybe then, he will have peace.)

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt: KakaSaku, "and then there were two".
> 
> This turned _very_ dark, but there's only one kind of ending I can write for two characters with negative self-worth.


End file.
